Recent articles in an Asia-focused international policy forum suggest that states such as Australia, Canada and South Korea can join up with other middle powers to secure the maritime order and restore the liberal international order. While well meaning and encouraging, the unfortunate truth is that these tasks are beyond the capacity of middle powers. The smartest ones won’t even try.
Maritime security has transformed from a permissive environment dominated by uncontested naval supremacy into a contested battlespace shaped by long-range missiles, drones, submarines, cyberwarfare and anti-access systems. Even the US Navy struggles to guarantee uninterrupted maritime security. The idea that a loose coalition of middle powers could independently safeguard Indo-Pacific trade routes borders on strategic fantasy.
The regional order has transformed from a stable US-led hierarchy into a fragmented and increasingly competitive strategic environment. After the Cold War ended, liberal-internationalist middle powers could amplify their influence through multilateral institutions, coalition-building and the language of a rules-based order because overwhelming American power underwrote the system. That has ended. The “US-led” epithet to “liberal international order” was there for a reason. That order collapsed without US leadership.
The greatest middle power initiatives were built through diplomatic specialisation, innovative and creative policies facilitated through a close academic-policymaker nexus, steady and well-planned diplomatic groundwork, and an ability to secure the support – or at least not the outright opposition – of great powers. Central to this was the maintenance of well-funded and well-trained diplomatic personnel. The capacity of middle power states to sustain such action has long passed.
Australia is one example. Between the 1989 establishment of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) forum in a Canberra meeting and the failure of then-Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s Asia-Pacific Community proposal some 20 years later, the cancer in liberal international middle power diplomacy was revealed.
Apec emerged at a moment of favourable strategic conditions, strong bureaucratic capacity, expanding economic globalisation and, crucially, support from the US and regional great powers. Every middle power success story from the era has one feature in common: the support, or at least acquiescence, of the dominant great power.
Finance ministers field media questions at the Apec finance ministers’ conference in Kananaskis, Alberta, Canada, on May 24, 1998. Photo: Reuters
